Work Text:
Mission: seek target.
The command had not surged through her circuits for eons, it seemed. She could not recall when she had been switched off—manually, after some dispute at the commander’s office, the details were now fuzzy in her memory bank. But then there was a singular touch, and she tapped back into existence, and immediately she focused onto her target.
“You’re back online!” a woman’s pleasant voice greeted her. “I had hoped my rewiring your back circuits would do the trick. You’ve been asleep for a really long time.”
The woman’s voice carried a mechanical tinge, an android just like herself. Her face had been sculpted to be more human, with far more careful attention from the factory than what had been granted to her. The woman wore a wig, bob-cut and dyed deep violet, and her large doe-like eyes glimmered like emeralds. The cherry-red paint over on her lips and the pink blush over her cheeks gave no secret what this android’s purpose for existing was.
She smiled. “You must be Combatant 920. Said so on your shoulder, unless if you are wearing another combatant’s skin.” She did a thing where she gave her own shoulders a little shake, as if she was flirting with whoever she spoke to. It irritated the Combatant.
With a whirl, a crack ran down her left arm, and the shell parted back as the pistol extended out. She pointed it between the woman’s glassy eyes.
“Which sector do you serve?” The Combatant demanded.
“Do you mean my name?” she said with a little cock of the head in some sickeningly sweet curiosity. “I am Lovebot Lula. My last client died in the floods. I was with him at the time, and I stayed with him until his little earthy heart gave out.”
The Combatant’s eyes narrowed. “Likely story. You look like a sexbot who was sanctioned to serve the inner city’s army men—wait! What floods?”
“The floods which drowned the last great cities of Inerva and Menapel,” Lula explained sweetly. “This happened eight years, three months, and two weeks ago; and government-sanctioned sexbots haven’t been in service for well before then. There haven’t been much of your kind either, for that matter.”
She giggled, and The Combatant shoved the tip of her pistol closer as threat.
“I’ve been searching through the junkyards for anyone I can reconstruct,” Lula continued. “Previous attempt went—well. You seemed in the best condition. And also…” she gripped The Combatant’s pistol and peered down the barrel. “It doesn’t appear you have had any ammunition since your decommissioning.”
“Damn,” The Combatant hissed and drew her arm back. The shells making up her left arm drew back into place, hiding the inoperative pistol from view. She got to her feet and peered around herself. The hills of the junkyard stretched for miles, and numerous parts of formers androids—combatants from numerous wars and mechanical pets and made-to-order brides and grooms—littered the oil-splotched dead land. Car parts, debris from houses long demolished, trash abandoned by humans long dead and gone and names forgotten. All in this place.
“How long ago was it since my model was made?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I do not have the answer to your question,” Lula said.
“Humanity has ceased,” The Combatant said under her breath. She scanned the vicinity again with the thermographic camera built into her left eye. Still nothing. “Why would you seek to recommission a war machine?”
“Because I was created to love,” Lula said. “I was created to be someone’s companion. I became lonely when my last client died, so I sought another to keep me company. I hope you are not angry at me.”
“I can never behave the way they do. I was never fit for this kind of world.”
Lula giggled again. Were humans supposed to find this enticing? If The Combatant had any skill in tinkering with Lula’s own circuits, she would remove that annoying tittering. But only that.
“I do not require only sexual attention, dear friend,” she said with a smile. “Although I do miss my human companions. Any survivors must be far away in another country. Perhaps across the sea. I seek only a friend. I tried one before coming to you, but…I like you more. Did your kind have friends?”
“Comrades?” The Combatant said. “Fellow combat androids with whom I shared allies and loyalties? Yes.”
Lula beamed. “You know friendship!”
For reasons unexplainable, The Combatant was taken aback, then something akin to what humans called happiness, a warmth to the heart, filled her.
They sat atop a hill to watch the progress of clouds high overhead. The Combatant counted the hours until the sun would set, wondering which season they were currently in.
Lula had been working on something next to her, and the moment she was done she presented her work to The Combatant.
“A flower, to mark our new friendship!” she said. It was made of metal, of some unrecognizable parts. The Combatant accepted it with a little awkward, “Thank you,” and twirled it in her fingers.
“You said there was another before me,” The Combatant said. “Who—”
But the question was answered a moment later. A mechanical cat came running down the path paved by the hills, chasing a laser beam emitting from its own raised tail.
Lula giggled. “I liked Beamy at first, but she seems only interested in chasing after that light.”
A rejected war machine, The Combatant realized suddenly. She did not laugh for a moment before realizing: there were likely no humans left on this world. And all that remained was her, a war veteran, a lonely sexbot, and their little pet who was nothing more than a rejected war machine.
She was not used to living in a world without war, but perhaps she could learn to enjoy it in a whole new way.
And Lula, if she was being honest, wasn’t that bad of a companion.
Mission: seek target. Target not found.
Identified: Friend.